Lemuel Ricketts Boulware (1895 in Springfield, Kentucky

Springfield, Kentucky

Springfield is a city in and county seat of Washington County, Kentucky, United States. The population was 2,634 at the 2000 census. It was established in 1793 and probably named for springs in the area.-Geography:...

 - November 7, 1990 in Delray Beach, Florida

Florida

Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

) was General Electric

General Electric

General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...

’s vice president of labor and community relations from 1956 until 1961. Boulware's business tutelage and political cultivation of Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....

 from 1954 to 1962 while Reagan was a spokesman for the company is argued to have led to Reagan's conversion from New Deal

New Deal

The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...

-style liberalism to Barry Goldwater

Barry Goldwater

Barry Morris Goldwater was a five-term United States Senator from Arizona and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 1964 election. An articulate and charismatic figure during the first half of the 1960s, he was known as "Mr...

-style conservatism.
Boulware's aggressive 20-year-long policy of “take-it-or-leave-it” bargaining by GE became known as "Boulwarism

Boulwarism

Boulwarism is a negotiation tactic named after General Electric's former vice president Lemuel Boulware, who pioneered the strategy.In negotiations with labour unions, it is an offer which is ultimate and to which no further revisions will be made...

". He devised the strategy in reaction to success in the 1946 general strikes by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the other two largest unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).